The Migration Mobile: Border Dissidence, Sociotechnical Resistance, and the Construction of Irregularized Migrants

The Migration Mobile offers an account of the very different technologies implicated in border crossing and migration management. Borders have been sites of contestations and struggles over who belongs and who does not, who is and is not allowed to move freely in transnational or national spaces. Embedded as they are in the bordering process, policing and security practices produce the irregularity and illegitimacy of the migrating subject. At the same time, border practices simultaneously imply processes of dissidence and resistance. Border infrastructures and resistance to bordering practices refer to dynamic and complex interactions between migrants and non-human others, technologies at the borderland and elsewhere. Border guards, EU officials, Frontex officers, activists, NGOs and solidarity networks configure both hybrid alliances of humans/nonhumans and new virtual and urban spaces in order to enforce or resist bordering. Through analyses of empirical cases drawing from the European border regimes the book investigates how technologies employed by states and EU border agencies configure the border regimes; how spaces of migration are configured through uses and re-uses of high-tech technologies; and finally on how the border regimes and ’the border industrial complex’ are contested reconfigured by the use of ICT by migrants and solidarity networks.

Vasilis Galis is an associate professor in the Technologies in Practice Group at the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Martin Bak Jørgensen is a professor affiliated with the Democracy, Migration and Society (DEMOS) research group at Aalborg University, Denmark.

Marie Sandberg is an associate professor of ethnology, and director of the Centre for Advanced Migration Studies (AMIS) at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.